Virginia Woolf by Ruth Gruber

Author:Ruth Gruber [Gruber, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-4532-4864-5
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2012-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth; which issued, just opposite Regent’s Park Tube Station, from a tall quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten tree for ever barren of leaves which lets the wind run up and down its branches singing

ee um fah um so

foo swee too eem oo,

and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze.”16

In turning to the world of the sub-conscious, Virginia Woolf finds fitting cause for hallucinations. The associative conceits of nature, loved by the romanticists and condemned by their critics, are permissible in the consciousness, and Mrs. Dalloway, feeling that another woman is crushing her, believes she can “hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul.”17 The darkness of this underworld allows a vagueness of images which sunlight repels. Where earlier writers fell back upon dreams to absolve many impossible illusions, Virginia Woolf, like the psycho-analytic novelists, seeks out this dream world consciously. There “are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing.”18 She still perceives the duality between fact and fancy, but in the dream-world, illusions become reality, justifying a haziness and extravagance otherwise absurd. “Such are the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of fruit to the solitary traveller, or murmur in his ear like sirens lolloping away on the green sea waves, or are dashed in his face like bunches of roses, or rise to the surface like pale faces which fishermen flounder through floods to embrace.”19 Heaped together, unobjectified, the very conceits satirized in “Orlando” are now allowed because they make no pretence at reality. They exist in trauma and there they are absolute. It is the indelible mark of her character, that, needing expression for such poetic fancies, Virginia Woolf seeks a form in which they are acceptable. Dreams are a refuge, a precaution. At all costs, poetry must find outlet.

The tradition that women think emotionally is embodied in Clarissa Dalloway. Her thoughts are a firework of ejaculations; of poetic visions and feminine ecstasy. “ ‘What a lark!’ ‘What a

plunge!’ ” she cries typically in the first page, her introduction: “How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, ‘Musing among the vegetables?’—was that it?—‘I prefer men to cauliflowers’—was that it?”20

The logical procession of ideas, attributed to men, is foreign to Clarissa. She has flashes of intuition, of reminiscences, whose strong emotional appeal compels cadences and imagery. Lest she lose

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